Johnny Behan - Later Life

Later Life

Behan lived primarily in Tombstone through 1886. In 1887, he moved to Yuma where he became the assistant superintendent of the Yuma Penitentiary. He killed one of several prisoners who died during a large escape attempt, saving a guard's life. On April 7, 1888, he was promoted to prison superintendent, serving until July, 1890. His management of the prison was marked by prison disorder and mismanagement of public funds, generating complaints by the press. The Arizona Republic noted that $50,000 had passed through prison official's hands without any accounting. He faced censure for misuse of public funds and for running the prison in a "coarse and brutal manner" in 1890. The complaint against him specifically cited the prison conditions afforded Manuela Fimbres, a woman incarcerated in the Yuma Prison. She was allowed to roam free within the prison, and she became pregnant, delivered a child, and got pregnant again while he was warden. Former Tombstone resident and writer George W. Parsons commented that he thought Behan was "on the wrong side of the bars".

After 27 years in Arizona, Behan moved east, and in 1891 was in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and by 1892 was in a commission business in Washington, D.C. He worked in various government and commissary capacities to the end of his life.

On July 3, 1893, he became an Inspector at Port of Customs at El Paso, Texas. On March 12, 1894 he received a 50% pay increase and was elevated to the position of Chinese Exclusion Inspector. (Behan had been a founding member of the "Anti Chinese League" in Tombstone). For the next several years he traveled throughout the southwest arresting illegal Chinese immigrants. In 1897 he worked in the U.S. Patent Office, until at the outbreak of the Spanish-American war, Behan volunteered for and became corral-master or quartermaster at Tampa, Florida. When this conflict ended, trouble in the Far East began, and in 1900 he served overseas during the Boxer Rebellion.

In 1901, after the war ended, he returned to Tucson where he became the Business manager for the Tucson Citizen. He moved to El Paso, Texas, where he worked as a purchasing agent for Texas Bitulithic, a paving company. While in El Paso during 1908, he campaigned for sheriff but lost. On December 14, 1910, the acting governor of Arizona Territory gave him a commission as a Railroad policeman in Mexico. He followed that with work supervising survey parties repairing levee breaks on the lower Colorado River. During 1911-12, he was head of the commissary for the Arizona Eastern Railroad.